GUEST COMMENTARY: Governor must engage in climate change response

Post date:

Thu, 10/03/2013 - 7:08am

The report released Sept. 27 by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms what residents of Alaska have known for years — climate change is real, it’s effects are here now, and things will only get worse.

The report cites the fact that the last three decades have been the warmest in recorded history, and that there is a 95 percent to 99 percent certainty that the current warming is caused by humans. The scientific debate about that issue is over. Alaskans might be wondering what Gov. Sean Parnell’s administration has been doing about this threat, and the answer is simple: virtually nothing.

In 2006, the Alaska Legislature established the Alaska Climate Impact Assessment Commission, which terminated in 2008. And then in September 2007, Gov. Sarah Palin established the Alaska Climate Change Sub-Cabinet to develop and implement a comprehensive Alaska Climate Change Strategy.

In establishing the Climate Cabinet, Gov. Palin correctly stated that: “Climate change is not just an environmental issue. It is also a social, cultural, and economic issue important to all Alaskans … Alaska needs a strategy to identify and mitigate potential impacts of climate change and to guide its efforts in evaluating and addressing known or suspected causes of climate change.”

The Climate Cabinet appointed working groups on mitigation, adaptation, immediate action, and research, and got off to a great start. In March 2009, the Immediate Action Work Group called for immediate steps to “identify communities at risk, timeframe, and true needs to address climate change impacts,” and to prioritize “needs based on risks to lives, health, infrastructure, homes, businesses, subsistence harvests, significant cultural attributes, and the quality of life.”

The Adaptation Advisory Group produced its Alaska Climate Change Strategy with 20 specific adaptation recommendations.

However, after Palin resigned in summer 2009 and Parnell (a former ConocoPhillips executive) replaced her as governor, the new governor quietly terminated the Climate Cabinet without informing the Alaska public. In fact, we now know that virtually all effort by the state to address climate change came to a grinding halt when Parnell became governor. Today, the governor’s office cannot identify a single recommendation of the Alaska Climate Cabinet or Climate Strategy that has been implemented.

As a result of the Parnell administration’s strategic disinterest in climate change, detailed planning for more than 100 at-risk Alaskan communities and ecosystems is in limbo. The state has abandoned a pro-active posture on climate impacts ranging from fisheries, wildlife, village relocation, health and disease threats, wildfire vulnerability, erosion and flooding danger, sea ice loss, and impacts to infrastructure. One worrisome threat is ocean acidification, which threatens Alaska’s salmon and crab fisheries.

And Alaska has failed to engage the international effort to reduce global carbon emissions. Instead, the state remains opposed to any effort in Congress, the White House, or the international community to reduce carbon emissions.

Convening the Climate Cabinet was the singular environmental achievement of Gov. Palin, and although Palin has now gone down the rabbit hole into the delusional world of Tea Party climate change denial (and moved to Arizona, far from the coast), the threat and impacts of climate change in Alaska are even greater than when the Cabinet was first convened.

We can’t simply ignore this threat, hoping it will go away — it won’t. And the cost of inaction would be enormous.

Climate change is the elephant in Alaska’s living room that for the last four years our political leadership has tried hard to ignore. This should not be a partisan or political issue, and we cannot simply sit back and wait for the federal government to do all the heavy lifting on this in Alaska. Every aspect of life in Alaska is at risk from climate change, yet the Parnell administration has ignored it altogether. That is irresponsible government, and the people of Alaska deserve better.

The governor must reengage state government in a serious response to the threats of climate change, with five immediate steps:

1. End his silence and inaction on the issue of climate change in Alaska;

3. Report to the Alaska public by Nov. 1 on the status of implementing the 2010 Alaska Climate Change Strategy;

4. Engage the State of Alaska in the international effort to reduce global carbon emissions and stabilize climate, and;

5. Establish a 10-cent per barrel equivalent state carbon tax to establish the Alaska Climate Change Response Fund, modeled on the state’s oil spill fund (also as I proposed to Gov. Palin in 2007).

History may well judge our current state government above all on how well it protects Alaska’s future from the devastating impacts of climate change. And so far, things aren’t looking good on that front.

Rick Steiner was a marine conservation professor with the University of Alaska from 1980-2010, was the university’s first marine advisor for Arctic and Northwest Alaska stationed in Kotzebue, then in Prince William Sound, and then Anchorage. He is now a conservation biologist with Oasis Earth, based in Anchorage.